"I think of [the canvas] as a drum skin… The music’s playing and the marks are being made as I’m going."
—Andrew Pierre Hart 

Andrew Pierre Hart’s expansive practice explores the relationship between painting and sound, using processes found in music such as improvisation, play and spontaneity to make scenes that represent sound in action. 

 

Here, we see a figure dressed in a glowing orange jumper, sitting with a mysterious device (a signifier or experimentation) in front of a massive sound system. As in much of Hart’s work, sound is suggested and invoked, playing at the edges of different sensations, probing questions about the sitter’s experience inside the scene; is he quiet, in the solitary act of reading, or is the scene in fact loud, speakers blazing and reverberating around the room? 

 

This work is characteristically luscious and poetic. Using Hart’s typical palette of velvety blue and indigo hues, the scene evokes the nighttime – and the mysterious activities that might happen once the sun disappears and the music starts playing. 

 

Hart is a recipient of the Artangel Thinking Time Award (2020) and the Tiffany & Co. x Outset Studiomakers Prize (2019). His solo booth with Tiwani Contemporary at Frieze London in 2021 was named best booth by ArtNews. Recent exhibitions include Secret of Lightness, Parafin, London (2022); ICF’s Diaspora Pavillon 2: London, Block 336, London (2022); Mixing It Up: Painting Today, Hayward Gallery, London (2021); The Listening Sweet, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2021); The Abstract Truth of Things, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2020); Collective Intimacies at Theaster Gates' Black Image Corporation, 180 The Strand, London (2019); and the Royal College of Art Graduate Show, London (2019). He is represented by Tiwani Gallery.